


stitches

by ninemoons42



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Sewing, background cassian/jyn - Freeform, partly canon-compliant, protect Bodhi Rook
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-21
Updated: 2017-01-21
Packaged: 2018-09-19 00:17:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9408938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Bodhi likes to repair things, when he's not flying them -- and people think it's all about the things that fly, when in reality it's about the things that protect people, and that keep them warm.





	

He wakes up to a sharp burning sting of an ache in the bones of his shoulders, in the crooks of his elbows, and he clutches at his too-many too-thin threadbare jackets with trembling fingers. It’s far from the first time that he curses the cold, or the cracking noises in the walls -- the noises that jolt him and make him think strange thoughts about being buried under snow and ice.

The Rebel Alliance is in hiding on Hoth, and in the corners of his rational mind Bodhi Rook understands all too well why they’re here: this is a place that not even the Empire would consider claiming. Many an Imperial would have a conniption, he thinks, just thinking about conducting a quadrant-by-quadrant search, here on this forsaken planet where the temperatures alone would be more than a match for even the most heavily armored droid’s circuits. 

But he thought that would also have led to the rather obvious question:

Why _here_? Here, where predators lurked in every snowdrift and every ice-crusted cave, where the constant toothy howling winter was only the most obvious of those predators? Here, where they would have to ration every last consumable because getting them in the first place was going to be a trick, flying past the blockades and then into the snow-tossed conditions?

Bodhi curses, and the breath from those curses condenses into sullen icy puffs that curl away from him, and his stomach rumbles and starts to do swooping loops, caught between being hungry and being sick.

He does have a vague memory of shoveling something down his throat, late in the previous shift, but he’ll be damned if he remembers what it tastes like now.

Reluctantly he forces his chilled feet out of his worn and pilling blankets, and into boots that are both a little too large for him and a little too narrow. Through the nondescript frozen emptiness of the single-room bunk that had been assigned to him, and to the door -- but a long and worrying moment passes before that door finally deigns to open, cold-slow.

Just one step away from his quarters and he’s almost sprawling onto the freezing floor, tripping over a ragged rough bundle of something, rolled into a sort of ball. Fortunately there’s no one around to see the near-miss -- but that doesn’t stop Bodhi from shivering and swearing vengeance -- these actions keep him warm, anyway.

He kicks the bundle and only then notices that there’s a note attached to it.

_I don’t know why Cassian insisted I give you these. You can’t fit into them, and even if you did they’re no good to you right now. I tore up the left sleeve and leg during my last mission. Don’t wear this, and don’t worry about me. I can still make do, especially since anywhere else they might send me for this mission is still warmer than here. J_

He rereads the note for the third time, standing in that frost-ridden corridor with the cold hammering at the soles of his feet, with the cold that sets sharp icy teeth into every exposed inch of skin, and somehow he finds it in himself to smile.

(He has no idea where Jyn and Cassian are. He knows that they’ve been jumping at every excuse to take off-world missions. Them and most of the rest of the Rebellion, really; most beings in the galaxy were never built to survive in the bitter snows and winds of Hoth.)

If he can’t fly, not right now when more than half of the Rebel Alliance’s fleet is mostly derelict thanks to the series of battles that they’d had to fight on the way to Hoth -- then there’s still something he can do. He can still have this. 

The corridors are, not at all surprisingly, almost empty, and a quick glance at the chronos mounted on the walls of the command center is enough to tell most of that story. It’s the middle of the last daily shift, and the only beings who might still be awake are the ones who’ve volunteered for this part of the rota, and that’s why it’s easy for Bodhi to run from one part of the base to another. He’s just as grateful for the exertion and the warmth that it generates, as he’s annoyed at the relentlessly unchanging temperatures.

If anything, he feels like he’s crossing over into a part of the base that’s even colder.

He’s grateful to have Jyn’s fatigues to hold on to -- they keep his hands warm. He can hide his face in them, if anyone happens to pass him by. 

Past two small mess halls, past a series of ready rooms for the various squadrons, past haphazardly-labeled living quarters -- including the tiny suite that Baze and Chirrut had apparently commandeered for themselves, and in which they were also taking care of a handful of younglings, rescued from various Imperial stronghold worlds all over the galaxy -- and he’s very briefly tempted to say hello to Wedge and to Luke, except that their respective bunks are also hanging empty.

He’s only a little bit disappointed. But that’s all right, he thinks; he still has something to take his mind off all of the absences. They can’t help not being there, in any case.

He knows he’ll start going out on missions of his own as soon as the mechanics fix up the various shuttles and light freighters they’ve scrounged up.

Another series of familiar twisting and turning corridors finally lands him in the interconnected series of storage rooms and living quarters that are now home to the tiny requisitions team serving the entirety of the Rebel Alliance. He turns in at the first open door, and he has to be careful to step around the randomly precarious stacks of crates and other materials, and it takes a few minutes for him to find who seems to be the only other living being within the rooms: a female Rodian named Neeke.

“Hello,” Bodhi says, and he watches as Neeke blinks and looks up, confused. “Did I wake you?”

Neeke shakes her head. “I should be grateful that you have woken me up,” she says. “I am not supposed to fall asleep while I am in here. I am the sentry, you know. I am guarding these crates and boxes and all of the other things that we need.”

“You’re doing a good job,” Bodhi says as he snags an empty crate and sits down. 

“I will be happy to go off duty soon,” is the response. “It has been a long day for me. I came here from a resupply run.”

“Did you have any problems getting through -- other ships? Any problems while in port?”

“Nothing so exciting,” Neeke says. “Perhaps we were lucky. On the other hand, there was not much left of that supplier’s usual stocks.”

Bodhi frowns. “There’s been talk of Imperials holding up shipping.”

“And that is why I will be escorted by some of the starfighter pilots, when next I make a run,” Neeke says, picking up a datapad and scrolling through it, then putting it down and checking another. “We will likely need to liberate a few places.”

“I wish I could go with you.”

“If you are offering to be a co-pilot, I will not say no,” is her response.

Bodhi smiles back when she tilts her head in a friendly way. “You know what, I will absolutely take you up on that.”

“Good, I look forward to it. Now what can I do for you?”

He smiles, and looks down briefly at his bundle of fatigues. “The usual,” he says, quietly.

She directs him to a set of orange and yellow crates, and he’s lucky, this time: there is an actual whole spool of thread near the bottom of the smallest box, and a packet of new needles, and there is even a fresh set of shears waiting for him.

“That will need some sharpening,” Neeke says, when he presents his finds to her to be checked out. She points a bony finger at the pair of shears. 

“I can take it with me and get it sharpened somewhere else,” he says. “I still have a blade on me, I can use that for now.”

That gets him a nod and a quiet, friendly little noise, and he tosses her a wave before leaving.

He scurries back to his bunk and there’s no one to see him while he’s on the move, and he bangs a fist right next to the panel for the temperature controls over his bed because it doesn’t want to respond to repeated jabs of his finger to warm the space up.

There’s nothing for it but to make a nest of his blankets on his bed.

The first thing to do is to look at what exactly has gone wrong with Jyn’s fatigues -- and it’s easy to find the flaw, once he’s got the whole thing unfolded and laid out. 

“What the kriff, Jyn,” he says, quietly, tracing a finger along the series of ragged holes marching down the left leg. The right leg is damaged, as well, with a burn hole large enough to put his entire fist into -- and she hadn’t bothered to mention _that_ bit in her letter, for some reason.

He thinks he might want to have a word with her, as soon as she comes back from her mission with Cassian.

But he puts that out of his mind. Instead he thinks of stitches, and of repair, and he extracts the little vibroblade that Cassian had passed on to him from another raid into Imperial territory from one of the pockets in his beat-up rucksack, and sets it within easy reach.

He doesn’t think about the rest of his actions. These are things that he knows in his skin, in his sinews, in his bones: pick out a needle, and spool out a length of thread -- dark gray in this case, and he’s almost startled to be reminded of the coveralls he’d worn during his flight from the Empire. Thread the needle. His hands shake a little from the cold -- but he manages it on the first try.

Threaded needle. Dark gray length, doubled for durability, with a neat knot on the end. 

Mending to him is quiet work. Time in which his brain isn’t chattering away at him with fears and worries and the leftovers of his nightmares. He knows his friends are scattered off-world, and he knows he won’t rest easy until he can see them all again, until he can see for himself that they’ve come back.

But the ragged rugged material of Jyn’s fatigues gives way, easily, to the in-and-out flash of the needle -- and at the same time he’s pulling the shredded edges together. Stitch after stitch, carefully closing one hole after the other, and maybe he stops from time to time to make sure that he doesn’t strain his shoulder too much -- but he’s focused. He’s paying attention to the placement of each stitch, to the length, to the tightness.

Flying requires concentration. Mending clothes requires concentration, too.

But, well, no one’s likely to shoot him down while he’s stitching up the ragged holes and hems in someone’s clothes -- or at least, he thinks that’s the idea -- if he ever finds himself stitching up a sleeve in the middle of a hot zone, he’ll have to reconsider.

For now, he’s here in his freezing-cold bunk, and the left leg of Jyn’s fatigues seems to be all in order, and he can tie the knots so that his stitching won’t come undone. He can flick out the sharp edges on the vibroblade and cut away the excess thread.

Now, for the problem of the large hole.

The problem with the fatigues is, there are ragged edges on the ends of the sleeves, and with Jyn that can only mean one thing: she tore the extra cloth away, probably to use them as bandages or rags, so Bodhi can’t patch up the hole with the same material.

And the thing with these fatigues is, it’s better to patch them with something similarly hard-wearing, the better to avoid another type of damage in the exact same spot.

He looks around the room. Even to his own eyes -- and he’s used to living on a half-empty rucksack and no guarantee of fresh clothes -- the place looks pretty threadbare to him. 

His teeth chatter, as he thinks, and then -- he looks at his own sleeves.

Three jackets layered one on top of the other, none of them particularly effective, but the one he’s wearing next to his own disheveled clothing -- that one sort of works to keep him warm.

Jyn might appreciate the extra warmth, he thinks -- and so he doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t entertain the second thoughts. He just sheds that jacket, and takes a good long critical look at the sleeves.

“Might be enough,” he says to himself.

The vibroblade emits a soothing high whine when he turns it on. It makes short work of half of each sleeve. Another set of cuts rewards him with two flat patches.

There is another needle in the packet, designed for working with tougher, thicker materials.

Threading the second needle takes him a little longer -- and he thinks he might be hungry, when he hears and feels a faint rumble from somewhere in his midsection.

He’ll eat after he’s done with his work.

Making sure the two pieces of material that he’ll turn into the patch for Jyn’s fatigues goes a little more slowly. He needs to take finer stitches, and he needs to place them closer together.

There weren’t any machines for these kinds of repairs, back on Jedha where he’d grown up. Beings made do with needles and thread and careful close work.

He’s never going to be proficient with needles and thread -- but when he works with these things at least he’s not blowing things up, or he’s not running away. He’s not afraid, when he’s sewing, when he’s mending, when he’s repairing. 

Come to think of it, he’s never been afraid of flying in and of itself.

It’s the things that happen _while_ he’s flying that tend to bother him. Things like bombs going off, or other vessels trying to shoot at him, or the presence of stormtroopers.

He feels much better now for flying among beings who don’t hide their faces behind grim rictus-masks.

He goes over the join between the two pieces of his sleeve again, reinforcing the stitches, and he’s never going to be completely satisfied -- but at least the patch will be large enough for the hole in Jyn’s fatigues, and that will have to do.

Again the fine stitches set close together, and he hunches over the materials he’s sewing together, the tip of his nose nearly touching the rough cloth. He can feel the trickle of sweat down the back of his neck. (He’s sweating? Even with the freezing temperatures?) 

He stabs himself with the needle exactly forty-two times as he stitches the patch into place. He lets the blood drip onto his blankets.

He forces himself to stop sewing after he’s gone around the edges of the patch three times.

It’s not his best work, he thinks, but it might be enough to keep his friend safe, and he’ll have to content himself with that.

He puts all of his jackets back on, the one with the shortened sleeves buried beneath the rest, and ventures out into the rest of the base -- and as soon as he turns the corner he’s nearly run down by several beings running from the direction of the medcenter, carrying their kits and a stretcher and too many other things that leave him shivering from head to foot.

And one of those beings says something that sounds very much like _Sergeant Erso_.

Bodhi doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t think about the fact that he’s still carrying his needles and his thread and his shears and the bulk of Jyn’s fatigues in his arms -- he just sprints as best as he can, around corners and down snow-laden corridors, and the icy blast of Hoth’s usual snowstorms slaps him right in the face -- and in his lungs and in his blood as soon as he takes a gasp of a deep breath -- 

Familiar shapes ahead, familiar voices cracking in the freezing air: “I’m all right! I’m just karking cold! Out of the way -- ”

“Jyn!” Bodhi cries.

Her arms around him. He can’t hug her back. He can only lean fondly into her as she embraces him. 

No scratches on her when he makes himself step back. No injuries. 

“Bodhi,” Cassian says.

 _He’s_ sporting several old bruises. 

Bodhi growls. “Stop getting into fights!”

“That’s what I always say,” Jyn says with a smirk. And: “What are you doing with my fatigues?”

“I mended them,” he says.

“You what?”

Cassian slings an arm around his shoulders. Asks, smiling, “Feel better?”

“I don’t even know how you know,” he says.

“Lucky guess.”

“Thanks!” Jyn engulfs him in another hug. Her lips smacking loudly against his cheek.

He’s warm, suddenly, pinned between the two of them, though there are snowflakes on Jyn’s eyelashes and on Cassian’s shoulders.

He’s warm, and he’s grateful that they’re both safe, and by his side.

**Author's Note:**

> I am also on tumblr [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
